O Caledonia

Jim wiped his rabbit-skinning knife on his trouser leg. He had come in to turn off the music and the lights and so he turned them off. Then he went into the outer darkness. For a long time the castle was silent.

The wild winds of dawn beat about Auchnasaugh, moaning through the treetops and rattling the windowpanes. At last they retreated northwards, bearing with them Janet’s spirit, far north of love or grief, until their withdrawing was no more than the sigh of the sea in a shell.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

In her career as a novelist and journalist, Elspeth Barker

wrote for the Independent, the Observer (London), the Sunday Times (London), London Review of Books

, and many other publications. Elspeth also taught Latin at what she described as a naughty girls’ school on the Norfolk coast and worked as a tutor and lecturer in creative writing at the Norwich University of the Arts. She published her first novel, O Caledonia, at the age of fifty-one. O Caledonia was awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. Elspeth was married to the poet George Barker and died in 2022.

Maggie O’Farrell is the author of the Sunday Times

number one bestselling memoir I Am, I Am, I Am and eight novels, including The Distance Between Us, which won the 2005 Somerset Maugham Award, The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the 201 °Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave

, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award, This Must Be the Place, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Novel Award, and Hamnet, which won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction. She lives in Edinburgh.

www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Elspeth-Barker

www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Maggie-O’Farrell